Free resource
Claude Already Remembers You
There's a list about your business sitting in your settings that you've never read. Two minutes to check it.
Updated 17 August 2026
Here’s something almost nobody knows.
Claude has been building up notes about you as you chat. Not because you switched anything on. It’s on by default, it’s been on your account the whole time, and there’s a list sitting in your settings that you’ve probably never opened.
It’s not sinister. It’s genuinely one of the best things about using it for work. But you should know it’s there, and you should go and read it.
Where it is
Settings, then Memory. The toggle at the top says “Generate memory from chats”.
Have a look at what’s in there. You’ll see entries grouped into categories, and if you’ve been chatting to Claude for a few months, there’ll be more than you expect.
Mine knows I run a ballet school, roughly how big it is, that I write to parents rather than to businesses, and that I can’t stand em dashes. I never sat down and told it any of that in one go. It picked it up.
Why it’s actually useful
Because it’s the difference between explaining yourself every morning and just getting on with it.
Without it, every conversation starts from nothing. Who are you, what’s the business, who are you writing to, how do you like it. Five minutes of setup before you get to the thing you actually wanted.
With it, you open a chat and it already knows. You go straight to “write me the back to class email” instead of explaining what a back to class email is.
That’s the whole benefit. It’s not clever, it’s just the removal of a small daily annoyance that was quietly putting you off using it.
What to actually do about it
Go and read it once. Genuinely, this is the whole action. Two minutes.
Delete anything that shouldn’t be there. Each entry can be removed on its own. If something’s wrong, or it’s picked up a detail you’d rather it hadn’t, take it out.
You can just tell it. In a normal conversation you can say “remember that I write to parents of two to five year olds” and it will. You can also tell it to forget something. No menus.
Leave it on. Almost certainly. It’s doing more good than harm and switching it off means going back to explaining yourself daily. Read it, tidy it, move on.
The bit that matters for our sector
The rule applies here as much as anywhere: the people stay out, the problem can come in.
If a family’s details went into a chat, they can end up in a memory. That’s not a new risk, it’s the same risk you already knew about, arriving somewhere you weren’t looking.
So when you read that list, you’re checking two things. Is it accurate, and is there anybody in it who shouldn’t be.
If you’ve been describing situations rather than naming families, there’ll be nothing in there to worry about. That’s rather the point of the habit.
Three things worth knowing
Each Project has its own memory. If you’re using Projects, what Claude learns inside one stays inside it. What it picks up while you’re working on marketing doesn’t leak into the one you use for parents. That separation is deliberate and it’s useful.
Incognito chats don’t go into memory. If you start a chat with the ghost icon in the top right, nothing from it is saved to memory or to your history. Handy for anything confidential on the business side, pricing, staffing, a conversation with your franchisor. Still not where a family’s details go. There is no mode where a family’s details go.
It’s included when you export your data. So if you ever download everything Claude holds on you, the memory comes with it.
What memory is not
This is worth being clear about, because the two get muddled.
Memory is what Claude picks up on its own. Passive. It notices things as you go.
A Project is what you deliberately brief it with. Active. You sit down once and tell it who you are and how you want things done, the same way you’d induct a new member of staff.
Memory is the member of staff noticing how you like things. A Project is the induction you gave them on day one.
You want both, and they do different jobs. If you want to know what Projects are actually for, that’s the four jobs guide.
A note if you’re on ChatGPT
I use Claude, so that’s what I can show you. If you’re on ChatGPT, the thinking is the same and the buttons are somewhere else. I’m not going to pretend I know where, because I don’t use it.
Both are good. Claude is the one that stuck for me.
Two minutes, today
Settings. Memory. Read the list.
It’s the quickest useful thing on this whole site and almost nobody has done it.
August 2026 edition. Anthropic change these settings from time to time, so I check them every quarter and update this page when they move.
More free guides at www.katemarkham.ai/resources.
Questions? I’m at hello@katemarkham.ai, always happy to help.
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